By making that declaration, you give me time to say, "You are mistaken. You
may feel like giving me a hug, but I do not need or want any physical contact
with another person. Not now. Not later. Not you, ever. But thank you so
much for giving me time to explain this so that nothing unfortunate would
happen."

I might even have time, before you leave in a huff, to say, "The list of people
whom I am ever glad to hug is very, very short, and everyone on it shares DNA
with me or my children or grandchildren, or, in the two cases not covered by
DNA, has shared a very close friendship with me for at least fifteen years."

However, I have never had the experience of someone saying "You look like you
need a hug" who was not already in the process of making the physical
assault called "ambush hugging."

So I cannot thank them for giving me warning, because they did not. I am
forced, instead, to recoil in my chair or step briskly away, ducking my shoulder
to evade the tackle.

At that point I usually move far enough away that I don't have to converse even
one moment with the ambush hugger. So I can't say to them the message that
they should have received from my physical response. Let me explain now:

"Apparently when you have kindly feelings toward someone, or when you see
someone with an uncheerful face, or when you feel lonely and unconnected,
you think that grabbing the other person like a predator and getting your
breath up in their face will solve your problem.

"And perhaps it will. But it will not necessarily solve theirs, because from the
moment you attack them with your uninvited hug, their most immediate
problem may well be you.

"Let me speak specifically of myself. When you see a look of revulsion on my
face at the moment I realize I'm being ambush-hugged, that is because I am
revolted at uninvited physical intimacy.

"If you see a look of anger on my face, it's because I'm outraged that you have
so little respect for me as a human being that you think you have the
right to embrace me without my consent.

"If the list of people I am glad to hug is very short, the list of people whom I will
ever forgive for ambush-hugging me is even shorter: No one is on it. No one.

"One ambush hug means that you cannot be trusted to keep your hands to
yourself. It means you are so arrogant you think you have the right to control
and manipulate other people's bodies.

"It means you are not my friend, because my friends don't ambush hug
anyone, and they know me well enough to know that I never, never 'look'
like I need a hug.

"I'm not sure what that particular 'look' is, or I would school myself never to
have it. There are times when I've been very sad, but I try not to let it show on
my face.

"And at the worst times of my life, when I have felt the most bleak and
despairing, when I think things cannot get any worse, it's amazing: An ambush
hug proves that in fact I could feel worse, and now I do."

Don't misunderstand. There are cultures where hugging is required, and when
I visit those remote and alien countries -- Hollywood Filmland, New York
Publishingville -- I take part in the social rituals. I give the perfunctory
shoulder-touch and even the air-kiss.

But these actions are merely expected. Neither person is dominating or
intruding on the other. It's the local culture's equivalent of a handshake, just
as "You're such a genius!" is the Hollywood equivalent of "hello," and carries
not a shred of meaning beyond, "I hear that you did something once and so for
now I will treat you as if you were a peer."

There are other unspoken messages in various embraces. For instance, when
one person, conversing with another, lays an arm across the other person's
shoulder, he may tell himself that he's "being intimate" or "showing
friendship," but that is never the message received.

The real message of the arm-across-the-shoulder hug is, "I am your superior.
You are so far beneath me that I can touch you whenever I want, without
invitation or consent. I am about to lie to you in order to get you to do what I
want."

I learned these meanings as a child and then teenager at church and at school,
and I have never found a case where the arm-across-the-shoulder hug meant
anything else.

People who want me to do something are well advised to keep their hands to
themselves and use only their words, or the display of a weapon, to
convince me to go along with their plan.

I realize that I have not written this with the perfect kindness and correctness
employed by Judith Martin when writing as "Miss Manners," but my readership
is divided into two groups: ambush-huggers and civilized people.

The civilized people already know the rules about hugging (don't ever, without
explicit advance consent).

And the ambush-huggers need a wake-up call, because someday they're going
to hug the wrong person and find themselves lying on the floor getting the
breath hugged out of their throat.

This has been a public service announcement. You're welcome.

*

I eat in my car. Not constantly, but often enough that I get crumbs on the
floor and in every crack and crevice. (Most of them are from the crumbly
cheese scones they make at Great Harvest.) Other dust and dirt seeps in -- on
my shoes, in the wind through the open doors.

And the windows get grimy -- waterspotted on the outside, covered with film on
the inside, even though I never touch the windshield with my skin. Gradually,
the car gets just a little disgusting inside.

As for the outside of the car, it gets dirty in rain and in dry weather, in pollen
season, in fruiting season, in the season of falling leaves. Other cars spatter
dirt onto the sides.

Sometimes people write "wash me" on the outside of my car, and I wonder: Do
you also bring a lawnmower with you so you can carve "mow me" into other
people's lawns? What possible difference can it make to you that my car is
dirty?

The truth is, I hate driving a dirty car, not because my car is so beautiful when
it's clean (it isn't; I don't think of shiny cars as "beautiful," merely as
functional), but because when I walk around my car in the garage, I brush
up against it, and if it's dirty, then my clothes get soiled, and that's icky.

I know all about washing your own car. I've seen people do it. I even helped
my father do it, from time to time, as we were growing up. I know the process.

I also know how to wash and iron my own shirts. That doesn't mean I have
any desire or intention to do it. There are other people who accept money for
doing the job better than I can do it myself, and I think my role in our great
economic system is to give them that shirt-washing-and-ironing money.

Ditto with car-washing.

The real problem is: It takes time to wash the car, and the process goes
most smoothly if I'm not in the car at the time. There's no danger that I'll
get sucked into the vacuum (though many car washes have powerful vacs); I'm
just bulky and shouldn't be in the way.

So getting my car washed means that either I have to go sit in the waiting room
at the car wash, or I have to inconvenience somebody else by making them pick
me up while my car is being washed, and then bring me back to get it when
they're done.

I don't know about you, but I never wake up in the morning thinking, Oh good!
I get to go sit in a bleak waiting room with a bunch of candy machines
while somebody cleans my car!

Then I heard that a good friend had just gotten involved in a new line of
business: A traveling car wash.

That's right. I back my car all the way from the garage into the driveway --
maybe a forty-foot journey -- and the car wash comes to me.

While my car is being washed, I can go into my house and get work done in my
office. Or sit and watch TV. Or have lunch. Whatever I want, because I'm
home.

Isley Brothers Auto Detailing charges reasonable rates for a simple exterior
wash and wax, or for a full interior detailing, depending on the size of the
vehicle.

And they come with more than a few buckets and rags. They have their own
pressure-washing equipment and professional-strength car vacuums because
they know their competition is the fully equipped car washing station.

We tried them the first time when I simply could not afford the time to go sit in
a car wash, but I'm pretty sure that they will now be our regular car washing
service.

They came when they said they would; they did superb work; and, when
the weird way the rear seats fold up and down in my SVU there was a small
patch that got overlooked, they came back and made the job complete. Total
customer satisfaction -- I can attest to that, because I was the customer and I
was totally satisfied.

Now, no car washing service can compete on price with your own hose and
a bucket of soapy water and some rags and your own elbow grease -- just as
no laundry can compete on price with your own washing machine, drier, and
iron.

You have to decide for yourself what your time is worth. If you enjoy getting
outside and washing your car, why in the world would you pay someone else
forty bucks to wash your car?

When it comes to a full detailing of my car, inside and out, I don't have either
the skill, the patience, or the equipment to do an adequate job, let alone
an excellent one. So the more-than-a-hundred-bucks job is one that I can't do
for myself.

I can't afford to get a full detailing every week or even every month. But three
or four times a year, it's good to get my car washed right to the bones, and well
worth the price. And given what my time is worth -- to me, anyway -- I'm
saving money, too.

If you want an excellent car cleaning at your own home (or wherever your car
will be for an hour or two), call and make an appointment with one of the
Isley Brothers, or their partner Ken Cook, at one of their phone numbers:

Alex Isley, 336-268-7343; Andy Isley, 336-988-8037; Ken Cook, 907-957-2424.
They do good work; they stand behind it. (They also have a physical location at
1616 Spring Garden Street in Greensboro -- but I've never been there ...
because they come to me.)

I never knew I needed it until they offered it: A car wash that makes
house calls.

*

This summer's season of American Ninja Warrior ended with a bang -- for the
first time, an American contestant made it through Level 3 of the Las Vegas
finals and up the final rope-climb-in-thirty-seconds to reach the top of "Mount
Midoriyama."

Japanese competitors have beaten the course before, starting with the 2006
season of the Japanese show Sasuke. But no American made it through the
Level 3 obstacle course and then up the 75-foot rope ... until this year, when
Geoff Britten made it with a fraction of a second to spare.

Then world-class rock climber Isaac Caldiero climbed the same rope a few
seconds faster, and therefore won the million-dollar prize.

Britten was noted for having Popeye-like forearms, and in his rope climb he
seemed to rely far more on those arms than on his legs. But that arms-only
labor came not that long after his muscle-searing completion of Level 3, and
anyone who watches him on that course knows that he made it through by
grim determination.

Arm fatigue slowed him down ... but he made it anyway.

Britten was an example of heroic tenacity. He simply refused to fail.

Caldiero, on the other hand, made it all look, if not easy, at least fun. There
seemed to be no visible strain. His fingers seemed to be strong enough to go on
gripping ledges, pipes, and ropes forever.

They keep calling Caldiero a "busboy," but what he really is, by way of career,
is "rock climber who occasionally buses tables in order to earn a bit of coin."
This guy is truly outside the American economy -- living in a tent, buying very
little, and training, training, training.

You can't say that he "doesn't have a life," because this is the life he has
chosen -- to push his body to the limits of its capabilities.

I imagine that he'll find out what those limits are when he falls a hundred feet
from an upside-down rock climb and dies. At which point the information
about his physical limits will be useless to him.

But not by much. And it's not as if Britten didn't also train to the limits of
human endurance.

The odd thing is that if there has ever been a contest winner who didn't
need the prize money, it's Caldiero. As he said after winning, "We
considered ourselves to be rich and happy before all of this, so this is just a
bonus.... You definitely aren't going to see us out driving around in fancy cars
and living it up. You know, we're going to keep down to our roots, and we're
going to go rock climbing."

I think that the biggest difference in his life will be that Caldiero won't have to
bus tables anymore. And if his lifestyle continues unchanged, when he dies
there will still be more than half of his prize money left for his heirs.

This is a man who committed to the simple life, and he wasn't kidding when he
said he and his girlfriend were "rich" on a busboy's part-time income.

I've heard nothing about what the second-place finisher gets. Surely Britten,
the first American to complete the course, will get something.

My wife and I watched this finale together, in awe at what these competitors
were able to do.

It can be agonizing to watch excellent athletes make one tiny mistake and get
eliminated from the contest.

But even then, there's much joy to be taken from the fact that all the
competitors seem to be rooting for each other to succeed, and to be
genuinely disappointed when at some point they fail.

The Ninja Warrior competitors all seem to understand that they aren't
competing against each other, and one player's success does not cause any
other player to fail. Instead, they are vying against the obstacle courses.

They avidly watch each other compete, because there are no rehearsals on
these courses, so they have to learn from each other's tactics and mistakes. In
the process, they also give respect to those who succeeded -- or came close --
or exceeded their own previous best to reach a new level.

If you haven't watched American Ninja Warrior, I highly recommend that you
take the chance to view the Vegas finals as they are rebroadcast on Esquire TV.
Watch it to see the human body taxed to the utmost. And watch it also to see
the human spirit at its most stubborn ... and generous.

*

As long as I'm recommending shows to watch, let me point out a couple of
videos that are well worth viewing -- especially if, like me, you are sometimes
tempted to read or respond to texts while you're operating a vehicle in
motion.

In the first video, a Belgian driving instructor tells his students that part of
their driving test is to successfully negotiate an obstacle course while
texting. The students accept the idea that this would be part of the test --
because, after all, texting while driving seems to be part of modern life.

The results are just what you'd expect, and what the driving test helps these
students realize is that there is no safe way to operate a moving vehicle while
distracted by texting.

Let's face it -- when we started using car phones, they seemed safe enough.
The phones that were attached to the car (before there were flippy little pocket
phones) were all designed to be hands-free, and it seemed that talking on the
phone while driving was no more dangerous than talking to a passenger while
driving.

But I learned very quickly that dialing the car phone while driving was
extremely dangerous. Even on a straight road, cars drift -- toward the curb
or shoulder or, most dangerously, across the center line. Punching in a ten-digit number while driving takes far too long.

You know how in movies, the actor pretending to drive in a car scene often
looks at the other actor for a long time, and in the audience you want to
scream, "Look at the road, you moron!"?

Well, that's how we should regard texting or dialing phones.

If you absolutely must check a text or email, or dial a phone call, wait until
you're stopped at a light, and don't move the car again until you've stopped
fiddling with your phone. Or simply pull over to the curb or into a parking lot
to do your phone business. There is no text worth dying or killing for.

*

It looks like the best parody ad you've ever seen -- a product called PooPourri,
which you spray onto the water in the commode before you make a deposit,
sealing in the undesirable odors and replacing any unwanted vapors with more
pleasant scents.

The commercial features a woman in a silly party dress, sitting on various
commodes in embarrassing locations -- at the office, at a party, watching a
movie with her boyfriend. In a semi-refined English accent, she candidly
explains how PooPourri saves you from stinking up the joint.